It was a casual Tuesday night, I was walking home from office contemplating about going to parlour. It’s been about 2 months since my last visit to parlour. My eyebrows have gone full wild. I didn’t have my eyebrows done till I was 18 i.e. high school. When I started doing it, it started bothering me if I didn’t do for one month.
The parlour is owned by a middle aged lady, Lia. She has a son and a daughter probably in 5th and 6th grade. I usually visit the parlour in the evening time and somedays I see her kids sitting on the couch after returning from school. There is the always something going on in the t.v. hanging on the wall. Neither time nor the language permits me to understand anything.
Last Tuesday there was a bit of a rush, I was waiting for my turn sitting on the couch. Lia’s kids were watching t.v. I also accompanied them. A guy and a girl were talking and suddenly the guy choked the girl to death. I couldn’t understand the context but this was the scene. I looked back at the kids, they were watching the murder scene so attentively. After some time they left with their school bags, I also left after getting the brows done.
Lia wasn’t there the whole time, it was her employees taking care of the customers. I never so guilty of watching t.v. before. Didn’t I just watch a violence with 2 kids? I’m a grown adult now… this kind of content has less effect on my mind now. But what about the kids? I’m wondering what they really felt. Did they care? Did they think of it after going home? Was it okay? Were they scared?
It was probably the only time the poor kids get between their busy schedule. But is it really refreshing their young minds?
It’s just a movie but still I find it not suitable for kids to watch. In India we hear a lot of buzz for censoring movies… from bad words to sexual content. Adults are always pissed off about their right to watch whatever they want. We as adults are not free to watch the uncut movies because of intervention of censor board. That is a different discussion as a whole…
Talking about the entertainment industry, are they making enough kid friendly contents?
Do the kids watch cartoons any more?
What else do they watch?
There are so many questions popping up in my head right now…
I am not writing this to judge lias parenting but I feel somewhere we are missing an important point. Looking into my personal life, I can also find the same story.
I was the youngest one in our semi joint family. My parents were always busy with work. There was no day care or pre school concept in the city when I was little. I spent a lot of time watching t.v. and most of the times adults were not around. Maybe mom was doing something in the kitchen, dad was reading the newspaper… sis was doing her homework. It was not possible to monitor what I was watching all day long.
I used to watch Discovery channel a lot… and animal planet. I used to watch murder mysteries, science stuff etc. I can’t tell what adverse affect it had on me in the long run but try to imagine a 4 yo toddler watching a story where a psychopath murders his entire family and kills himself. That’s just fucked up.
As I grew up elders forbade me to watch M t.v. and F t.v. For a long time I thought that F t.v. means naked people walking around which is definitely not the case. Watching someone’s bare body is not disturbing as watching a violence, murder or rape. I feel like my parents were more concerned about blocking the sexual content, but they completely looked over the fact that we were watching a lot of stuff which were not sexual but were not kid friendly as well.
In today’s context blocking content from children is almost impossible. Every body has access to internet and no matter how strict you are kids will get their way out. I feel in that case we need to be more interactive with the kids in order to understand their reactions and guide them in the right direction.
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